Harko: there was a bad place. In a way, both of his high school friends had died there, because Sal Turso hanged himself six months after being committed to a state penitentiary for life on a second-degree murder charge. In Harko, you saw no red-winged blackbirds or woodpeckers. Even sparrows steered clear of Harko.
This little stretch of 35? Nothing but a nice, comfortable woodland. Let me tell you, Senator, Sonny Cantinaro has seen Harko, and this ain't no Harko. This don't even come close. It might as well be in another world. What meets Sonny's appraising eye and increasingly impatient spirit is about a mile and a quarter of beautiful wooded landscape. You could call it a mini-forest. He thinks it would be cool to come out here by himself one day, tuck the Harley out of sight, and just walk around through the great oaks and pines, that big pad of felt beneath his feet, digging the birds and the crazy squirrels.
Sonny gazes at and through the sentinel trees on the far side of the road, enjoying his anticipation of the pleasure to come, and a flash of white jumps out at him from the darkness beside a huge oak tree. Caught up in the vision of walking alone under that green canopy, he almost dismisses it as a trick of the light, a brief illusion. Then he remembers what he is supposed to be looking for, and he slows down and leans sideways and sees, emerging from the tangle of underbrush at the base of the oak, a rusty bullet hole and a large, black letter N. Sonny swerves across the road, and the N expands into NO. He doesn't believe it, but there it is, Mouse's goddamn sign. He rolls ahead another foot, and the entire phrase comes into view.
Sonny puts the bike in neutral and plants one foot on the ground. The darkness next to the oak stretches like a web to the next tree at the side of the road, which is also an oak, though not as huge. Behind him, Doc and the Kaiser cross the road and come to a halt. He ignores them and looks at Beezer and Mouse, who are already some thirty feet up the road, intently scanning the trees.
"Hey," he shouts. Beezer and Mouse do not hear him. "Hey! Stop!"
"You got it?" Doc calls out.
"Go up to those ass**les and bring them back," Sonny says.
"It's here?" Doc asks, peering into the trees.
"What, you think I found a body? Of course it's here."
Doc speeds up, stops just behind Sonny, and stares at the woods.
"Doc, you see it?" Kaiser Bill shouts, and he speeds up, too.
"Nope," Doc says.
"You can't see it from there," Sonny tells him. "Will you please get your ass in gear and tell Beezer to come back here?"
"Why don't you do it, instead?" Doc says.
"Because if I leave this spot, I might not ever be able to f**king find it again," Sonny says.
Mouse and Beezer, now about sixty feet up the road, continue blithely on their way.
"Well, I still don't see it," Doc says.
Sonny sighs. "Come up alongside me." Doc walks his Fat Boy to a point parallel with Sonny's bike, then moves a couple of inches ahead. "There," Sonny says, pointing at the sign.
Doc squints and leans over, putting his head above Sonny's handle-bars. "Where? Oh, I see it now. It's all beat to hell."
The top half of the sign curls over and shades the bottom half. Some antisocial lad has happened along and creased the sign with his baseball bat. His older brothers, more advanced in the ways of crime, had tried to kill it with their .22 rifles, and he was just delivering the coup de grâce.
"Where's the road supposed to be?" Doc asks.
Sonny, who is a little troubled about this point, indicates the flat sheet of darkness to the right of the sign and extending to the next, smaller oak tree. As he looks at it, the darkness loses its two-dimensionality and deepens backward like a cave, or a black hole softly punched through the air. The cave, the black hole, melts and widens into the earthen road, about five and a half feet wide, that it must have been all along.
"That sure as hell is it," says Kaiser Bill. "I don't know how all of us could have missed it the first time."
Sonny and Doc glance at each other, realizing that the Kaiser came along too late to watch the road seem to materialize out of a black wall with the thickness of a sheet of paper.
"It's kind of tricky," Sonny says. "Your eyes have to adjust," Doc says.
"Okay," says Kaiser Bill, "but if you two want to argue about who tells Mouse and the Beeze, let me put you out of your misery." He jams his bike into gear and tears off like a World War I messenger with a hot dispatch from the front. By now a long way up the road, Mouse and Beezer come to a halt and look back, having apparently heard the sound of his bike.
"I guess that's it," Sonny says, with an uneasy glance at Doc. "Our eyes had to adjust."
"Couldn't be anything else."
Less convinced than they would like to be, both men let it drop in favor of watching Kaiser Bill conversing with Beezer and Mouse. The Kaiser points at Sonny and Doc, Beezer points. Then Mouse points at them, and the Kaiser points again. It looks like a discussion in an extremely unevolved version of sign language. When everybody has gotten the point, Kaiser Bill spins his bike around and comes roaring back down the road with Beezer and Mouse on his tail.